What makes for a good mystery? It’s an inherently subjective question with no clear cut answer, but general guidelines have existed for as long as the mystery genre itself. At the most basic level, the goal when creating a fictional mystery is to entertain an audience by inviting that audience to solve the mystery for themselves alongside the detectives in the story. In practice, this involves striking a delicate balance when it comes to respecting the audience’s ability to reason, to intuit, and to problem solve. Make the answer too obvious, and there’s no fun to be had in cracking the case. On the other hand, if the conclusion can only be reached by making drastic assumptions or leaps of faith, an audience may feel cheated out of a satisfying resolution. Of course, the willingness and ability to solve any mystery varies drastically from person to person. A conclusion that one person arrives at effortlessly may not even be a consideration for someone else. At the very least, ideally, an audience should have all the same information as the mystery’s protagonist. That way, even those who couldn’t put everything together on their own can still respect the paths of deduction once they’ve been revealed. Not everyone will try to figure everything out as the story progresses, but even those who are merely along for the ride will feel cheated out of a good story if the resolution comes entirely out of left field or if the narrator withheld any amount of essential information. Perhaps above all else, everything should make sense, from the perpetrator’s motive down to the very laws of nature. There’s no foolproof way to create memorable mystery fiction, but most good mystery fiction abides by these general guidelines.

As mystery fiction, the Professor Layton games are absolutely terrible. As video games, they’re still largely enjoyable – and The Last Specter is no exception to either of these rules.

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Back in the early ’90s, when Capcom began to develop a Mega Man game for the new and impressive Super Nintendo console, the company initially chose to ditch the franchise’s familiar protagonist entirely. Instead of merely sprucing up the look and feel of the happy little blue android, lead character designer Keiji Inafune opted to give Mega Man a full-scale redesign for the upcoming Mega Man X. The result was a substantially more aggressive-looking battle robot with red armor, a horned helmet, and long blond hair. Inafune was pleased with his creation, but ultimately decided that this new character was too different from the original Mega Man to serve as the new face of the franchise. So Inafune tasked another designer with creating a Mega Man X more in line with the legacy protagonist. Rather than scrapping his own design, however, Inafune doubled down on his fierce-looking red automaton and decided that he should serve as X’s superior, mentor, and idol.

Thus, Zero was born, and he was born a total badass.

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Like the previous episodes, Episode Three: The Sword in the Darkness of the Game of Thrones series suffers from an aging engine and a severe lack of compelling gameplay… and that’s by design. Rather than investing the time and resources it would take to compete with AAA titles on those fronts, Telltale focuses its effort on creating engrossing worlds with deep characters that you help develop through a slew of dialogue-driven decisions. More often than not, that strategy pays off as Telltale has told some of the most emotionally rewarding stories in video game history. However, when an episode of a Telltale game fails to present decisions with far-reaching effects on the main conflict of the story, you are in for a rather boring experience. Such is the case with Episode Three of Game of Thrones, an episode that never quite reaches the standards set by Episodes One and Two.

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